MONTREAL - Everyone can picture Montreal’s famous sights: the view of glittering skyscrapers from the Champlain Bridge, milling crowds on St. Catherine St., skaters at Beaver Lake and the orange glow of a wood-fired bagel oven.

But what of its sounds? The rat-tat-tat of the drill at a downtown construction site. Chiming bells at a Villeray church. Waves lapping against a pier in Lachine. The song of a red-winged blackbird in Jean Drapeau Park.

That sonic landscape is there to discover at montrealsoundmap.com, an interactive map of Montreal sound bites that is winning international kudos.

The pioneering project is the brainchild of two electro-acoustic music students at Concordia University, Max and Julian Stein, who started recording and posting sounds of the city three years ago.

Since then, the Pennsylvania-born twins have been commissioned to create sound maps of Stockholm, Brussels, Nunavik and Angola.

The concept of capturing and mapping urban sounds is catching on among artists and academics from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo.

At Berlin-based Radio Aporee (aporee.org), you can browse through thousands of ambient sound recordings of the German capital. In 2009, a “Wall of Sound” project to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall offered a sound map of the former dividing line between East and West.

In London, Ian Rawes, a sound archive technician at the British Library, has recorded, collected and posted more than 900 recordings at soundsurvey.org.uk. Sounds on the three-year-old site include street vendors hawking fruits and vegetables in a market; rioters looting a store in Peckham; and what it sounds like inside Big Ben when the clock chimes.

You can even travel back in time to hear London sewer workers singing in the underground city and a grammar-school Latin class, thanks to sound clips from the BBC.

In New York, where a local chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology chronicles urban sounds (nysoundmap.org), artists have incorporated sound maps of suburban trains into conceptual artworks.

The Montreal site, which currently features 284 sound bites, was a personal project, said Max Stein, 22. The brothers recently completed BAs in music and are working as research assistants under Sandeep Bhagwati, Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Art.

Even though the brothers, then 19, created the site outside of class work, Concordia spotlighted it as one of the university’s leading research projects at its President’s Conference Series last year – a rare mark of distinction for undergraduate research, Bhagwati said.

“It’s very powerful and can be very evocative,” he said of the sound map.

“It can create an acoustic history of the city. You can say, this is what this street corner sounded like in 2011,” he added.

Stein said one of his favourite recordings is of a woman making bubble tea in Chinatown with electronic music playing in the background, seemingly in time with the sounds of the shop.

“It was one moment in time,” said Stein, who has held music performances in an underpass in Mile End and in métro stations. He said that he goes out to record with no fixed goal in mind and captures long stretches of ambient sound, which he then edits down to short bites of less than a minute.

The trend traces its origins to a project in the late 1960s headed by Vancouver composer R. Murray Schafer, who coined the word soundscape, meaning sounds that provide a sense of place to inhabitants. The project, which mapped sounds like tugboats in the Vancouver harbour, combined environmental concerns with a growing interest in the acoustic environment. Advertising, elevator music and mechanical noise were creating a synthetic sound environment where silence and the sounds of nature were being drowned out, Schafer warned.

In London, Rawes has scoured through historical accounts like the Diary of Samuel Pepys to learn more about the sound environment of previous eras. Life was so much quieter before industrialization that a battle many miles from London was audible to people living on the city’s outskirts, he said.

Now, digitally interactive maps like Google Maps have provided a vehicle to make sound mapping available to a much wider audience, Bhagwati said.

“This community was very quick to notice that this was perfectly aligned with their goals,” he said.

The sound-mapping movement straddles the line between art and social-sciences research, he said.

“What the Stein brothers did that was really interesting was they really used the power of social media, saying everybody can record sounds with their iPhones or more sophisticated equipment and then you can upload it,” Bhagwati said.

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